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North Main Is All Ready for Its Holiday Inn Express

The new Holiday Inn Express about to begin construction at 3401 N. Main St. in the Near Northside will have some consistently quiet neighbors and some occasionally very loud ones — with the steady drone of the adjacent North Fwy. available to somehow bridge the gap. The 1.44-acre site, where the Casa Grande Mexican Restaurant stood until it was torn down 2 years ago (and Stuarts Drive-In before it), sits across N. Main St. from the Hollywood Cemetery (yes, the same cemetery featured in Wes Anderson movie Rushmore). And it’s just a bit more than a quarter-mile up N. Main from the White Oak Music Hall complex, whose outdoor concert habit spurred nearby residents kept up late at night by the noise to file suit against the venue — and later, the city of Houston — for failing to follow (and enforce) local sound ordinances.

Late last month, crews removed the concrete paving left behind after the Casa Grande demolition (see photos above). Just this week, a city permit was granted for a 58,929-sq.-ft., 95-room Holiday Inn Express on the site — up 10 rooms from the 85 promised a couple of years ago, when the developers submitted these drawings as part of an application for a variance that would allow them not to have to extend or widen Norma St., on the north end of the lot:

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The drawings showed the hotel sitting in the middle of the site, wrapped by a driveway and a mostly single row of parking spaces on all sides. Stubby, dead-end Grota St., which formerly bisected the site, was abandoned by the city in 2015 and acquired for the new development.

Here’s the lot as it appeared earlier this week, with all the paving newly removed, panning from north . . .

As a resident just across North Main (in Glen Park, not the cemetery), I am excited about this project… if out-of-town family descends during the holidays or whatever, we have convenient overflow accommodations!